A street drug arrest, a crackdown on cyclists - and why Broken Windows is a bust

It was as I walked down San Francisco’s Market St with my family on August 10 that I spotted a scene I’d previously witnessed only in TV shows such as The Wire. Two policemen were running towards us, guns drawn. As I started shepherding the family out of the potential line of fire, I spotted the reason for the fracas. A young-ish black man was sprinting towards us. He threw a large, plastic wrapped parcel over a wooden hoarding then, having ditched the evidence, surrendered himself. We continued our stroll as he knelt on the sidewalk, face towards a building, with the police officers handcuffing his hands behind his back.

 

San Francisco's Painted Ladies: the epitome of Victorian
respectability - and only a short walk from where our family
encountered a street drugs bust.

I didn’t know it at the time but, the previous evening, half a continent away, a confrontation between a young black man and white police officers had ended tragically differently. In Ferguson, Missouri, a police officer had pumped six bullets into Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, who was apparently holding up his hands in surrender and saying, “Don’t shoot!” One shot – to the head – killed him. The source of the confrontation appears to have been a demand by the officer than Michael and his friends walk on the sidewalk, rather than the road.

The scene in San Francisco ran through my head over the next few days as we saw, despite our holiday isolation, pictures of police in Ferguson equipped for war but facing mainly peaceful protesters. I also found myself making mental links between the scene we’d encountered and a far less grave injustice that was closer to home for me – the New York Police Department’s disproportionately harsh Operation Cyclesafe crackdown on cyclists’ rule-breaking.

The street drugs bust, the events in Ferguson and the NYPD’s harassment of cyclists all look to me to be the work of police forces more concerned about asserting their own authority than actually making the places they police safer. It’s hard in light of these and other incidents to avoid the conclusion that many US police forces are currently bereft of ideas and moral sense. While UK police forces rethought some aspects of their policing 30 years ago after urban rioting, the Metropolitan Police’s recent purchase of a water cannon hints that such thinking is creeping back in the UK too.

NYPD cruisers: sensitive, intelligence-led policing

The priority is to end appalling injustices such as the killings of Michael Brown and, closer to my home in New York, of Eric Garner, choked in Staten Island as New York police officers arrested him for a minor alleged offence. But better police forces would also surely reassess which offences demanded most of their attention. They would surely take more seriously the dreadful toll of death and injury on the US’s streets and give that national – but largely unacknowledged – tragedy a far higher priority.

I wouldn’t say I was precisely naïve about the potential misuse of police power, even before recent events. In one obviously conflict-ridden society, Bosnia, I remember seeing Bosnian Croat police harassing the mainly Bosniak – Bosnian Muslim – passengers on a bus where I was travelling in 1995 during the Bosnian war. Hungary’s police seldom impressed me when I lived there.

 

A Kosovo Liberation Army "policeman"
smokes while supervising sales of
smuggled fuel: just one of many
less-than-impressive officers I've
encountered during more than two
decades' reporting.

I have a particularly vivid memory from my home country of watching the reaction of Northern Ireland’s Royal Ulster Constabulary in July 1996 to rioting by members of the mainly Irish Nationalist Catholic community on the outskirts of Portadown, in the centre of the province. For five days previously, the police – mainly pro-British Protestants – had reacted with remarkable restraint as Protestants rioted over the routing of a march by the Protestant Orange Order in Portadown. After the police finally forced the march down Garvaghy Road, against the mainly Catholic residents’ wishes, I watched the police fire rubber bullets freely. At one point, I saw people of all ages, violent and non-violent alike, flee into a narrow passageway between shops. The police pumped plastic bullets indiscriminately into the passageway, knowing they would hit rioters and non-rioters.

My personal experiences as a cyclist have made me realise that bad policing affects places other than obviously conflict-ridden societies and people other than clearly discriminated-against minority groups. I’ve been lectured by City of London Police officers who were themselves breaking the road rules about my allegedly irresponsible behaviour. In May, I encountered a man who claimed – to my satisfaction – to be an off-duty cop. He grew verbally abusive when I asked him to move his car out of a busy, two-way cycle lane. There are stretches of road in New York where I know I’m likely to encounter police cars or vans illegally parked in the cycle lane and to have to dodge around them.

Yet I had retained, I now recognise, a residue of rather British innocence about democratic countries’ police forces, a feeling that they must somehow be on the side of the law-abiding, no matter their colour or background, against those who would harm them. I remember the times my parents had to call on the police when I was young and their polite attitude when they visited our large, respectable house.

 

Broken windows might have helped to make it safe for me
to walk nearly anywhere in this picture - it hasn't necessarily
done the same for people with darker skin.

Recent events have washed that residue out of me. I increasingly recognise how it was my family’s whiteness and respectability that won the police’s politeness. If I were black or belonged to some other obviously marginalised group, I would have far more – and probably far worse – stories about police behaviour. I’m more and more sceptical of the policing philosophy that’s come to dominate much of the western world in recent years – the idea that police intolerance of minor misdemeanours is critical to tackling crime overall. Bill Bratton, the police commissioner who returned to the top post in the NYPD earlier this year, pioneered this “broken windows” approach in New York City. Its apparent success in making the city safe again in the 1990s has led to its widespread acceptance as a policing approach elsewhere.

It’s to some extent because of broken windows that officers felt justified, I suspect, in violently restraining Eric Garner while arresting him for the minor crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. It’s because police officers are encouraged to create an orderly atmosphere on the streets, I suspect, that officer Darren Wilson thought it important to confront Michael Brown and his friends about where they walked. It’s a sense that street drug-dealing is worse than more discreet drug-dealing that leads to scenes like the one we encountered in San Francisco. I’ve long had a strong sense that the broken windows approach explained the NYPD’s tendency to give disproportionate numbers of traffic tickets to cyclists. If one believes that a police force’s main goal is to tackle the problems that create most noise at public meetings, it might well make sense to run a two-week crackdown on dangerous cycling.

 

Midtown Manhattan: a bad place to break a window,
thanks to Bill Bratton, but not a bad place, necessarily,
to commit a serious fraud

The approach’s limitations are clear as soon as one starts examining them. Any strategy that deliberately devotes disproportionate resources to small, “quality-of-life” offences by its nature takes resources away from investigating the crimes – racketeering, murder, rape, fraud – for which society imposes the harshest penalties. The approach quickly degenerates into an anti-intellectual tendency to go after the crimes whose victims make the loudest noise, rather than those that are the biggest problem. It’s obvious that the arrest of one street-level dealer is unlikely to do anything to eradicate demand for illegal drugs in San Francisco or the business of supplying them.

Some good might yet come out of the grim events in Ferguson and elsewhere in the US this summer if they prompt a thorough re-examination of how the US is policed – a change that would surely have repercussions in other countries too. It would be heartening to see police forces question whether the constant harassment of the poorest groups under broken windows makes sense. There is surely scope to ponder which offences cause the most overall harm and start to tackle them.

I’ve argued before that traffic policing would be far better if commanding officers’ pay depended partly on the numbers of people injured on their areas’ streets, rather than the numbers of tickets handed out. A police force focused on preventing crime rather than enforcing order would surely not have thought a confrontation over where a group of young men walked worth provoking. Intelligent traffic policing might even seek to encourage cycling, recognising that cyclists are far less likely to kill other road users than motorists are.

It’s hard to be optimistic that such changes are coming soon, however. Reaction to the events in Ferguson has followed a pattern all too familiar in the contemporary US – right-wingers have defended the police, while the left have criticised them. On Twitter last week, Bill Bratton wrote that he was “gratified but not surprised” that New Yorkers appreciated “quality of life enforcement measures”. I’ve seen even cyclists welcome Operation Cyclesafe’s misdirection of resources, saying that, since they never break the rules, they have nothing to fear from it. Few people seem to recognise how crackdowns on minor crime misdirect resources.

 

Operation Cyclesafe made this cycle lane on my route to work
no safer for me to use

Two experiences on our return from California crystallised the nature of the problem. I returned to my regular cycle commute in the last days of Operation Cyclesafe to find that the crackdown had unsurprisingly done nothing to make the streets safer for cyclists. The cycle lanes appeared still more regularly blocked than normal and drivers’ behaviour still worse than normal.

The Invisible Visible Woman, meanwhile, heard two women discussing Eric Garner’s death on the street. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that broken windows policing has turned some police forces into vehicles for the kinds of prejudice our neighbours were expressing.

“People say they heard him say, ‘I can’t breathe’,” one of them commented to the other, who nodded sagely. “But you have to remember – this was a man who’d been to prison ten times.”

An uncritical readiness to go after the offences that most annoy people quickly degenerates into a readiness to go after the people that most annoy the majority. That will sometimes be cyclists. It will far more often – and with far more deadly outcomes – be poor people like Eric Garner, condemned by prejudice to miserable and public deaths.

Citibikes, drivers - and the science of moral development

When I first started cycling to work down W54th street in Manhattan, I used to find it puzzling how cars would suddenly come to a complete, but brief, halt half way between 7^th and 6^th avenues. Then, after a while, I realised what was going on. There was a stop sign intended to protect a crosswalk on the new 6½ Avenue pedestrian path half-way along the block. Cars would carefully come to a complete - but milliseconds long – halt at the sign, to fulfill the legal requirements.

But I quickly recognised a second phenomenon. When I approached the crosswalk, I would stop if I saw pedestrians waiting to cross and let them go.  Most motorists would do the brief halt and drive on regardless, forcing the pedestrians to wait until a break in traffic.

The crosswalk came to symbolise for me the way that many drivers in cities worldwide end up reacting to road rules. They follow what they understand to be the letter of certain laws – in this instance, that cars must stop fully at a stop sign in New York City. But they ignore the wider spirit – that one should not barge past pedestrians trying to cross the road at a designated crossing point. The road environment for pedestrians trying to use 6½ Avenue is little safer as a result of the drivers’ brief stop at the stop sign than if they simply blew through. The sign plays next-to-no role in reducing the horrific annual death toll on New York City’s roads.

 

Five New York Police Department cruisers on W55th Street.
A heroic guess: in none of these vehicles is an officer pondering
how to push road users towards Kohlberg's higher stages
of moral development.

The behaviour puts me in mind of the famous work on moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who classified people’s moral development from the earliest stage – when they merely sought to avoid punishment – to the highest – when they behaved according to an established set of ethical principles. The drivers’ behaviour around the stop sign demonstrates the kind of moral reasoning that, in other fields, one might associate with a toddler seeking to be naughty but get away with it.

The question is how a city – any city, but the most pressing examples for me at present come from New York – can become a place where people interact according to the most advanced stages of moral development. Cities should be striving towards roads where users treat each other out of genuine concern and insight into the other person’s interests.

 

A Citibike stand, by the Brooklyn Waterfront, complete
with neophyte cyclists. Let's hope they're as keen
when they've completed the ride as before

The subject has been particularly on my mind this week because of the launch of New York’s Citibike bike-sharing scheme. It’s clear – from my own observations and from Dmitry Gudkov’s excellent stories and pictures of riders – that many new riders are using bikes for transport for the first time in New York City. It would be a tragedy if, after such a positive start, those new cyclists were to find themselves put off by the near-misses and abuse that other cyclists all too often experience.

The answer, it seems to me, lies in a shift in policing thinking intended, as good parenting should, to push road users gradually towards more considerate use of the road. It is likely unfortunately to prove a long, slow process.

I encountered evidence of the scale of the challenge on my way to work on Friday, as I made my way down E55th street. A car started pulling out into the bike lane as I approached, trying to push into a traffic jam, despite my repeated shouts that he was pulling into my path. When I finally, despite his continued efforts to block me, squeezed past, he shouted after me, sanctimoniously, “Share the road!”

There’s a simple problem underlying these complex issues, however. The NYPD, like probably quite a few police forces worldwide, doesn’t seem to have much of an idea what it’s trying to achieve with its road policing. That’s self-evident looking at most precincts’ traffic ticket statistics. Ticketing focuses heavily on issues like excessively tinted windows that are easy to prove, rather than on offences such as speeding or distracted driving where the behaviour is harder to prove but creates far more danger.

Only basic laziness – and the need to meet some arbitrary monthly target for ticketing – can explain incidents such as the one in April where several policemen - from a force, remember, that claims to have too few resources to investigate crashes properly - stationed themselves late at night on part of the Hudson River Greenway and ticketed and fined cyclists “for their own safety” for the purely technical offence of being in a New York City park (rather than on the far more dangerous roads) after the parks’ official 1am closing time. This and other similar incidents – the truck policing unit that ticketed more cyclists than trucks, for example – suggests the pressure on NYPD traffic cops is to meet quotas for ticket issuing, rather than to make the streets safer.

If such an approach is at work, it would chime with the evidence that’s emerged from the civil case against the NYPD over “stop and frisk” – the NYPD’s insistence on stopping young men to search them for weapons on even the most flimsy evidence. That trial has produced evidence that officers were told to meet targets for monthly stops, rather actually arresting criminals for serious offences. The force is facing legal action because many officers seem to have assumed – and in some cases to have been explicitly told – that the goal was to harass young black and Latino men.

 

Traffic infringements abound on W54th street.
A simple contribution to the police benevolent fund,
however, and no driver need worry.

On traffic policing, meanwhile, another regular sign of attitudes is the proliferation on cars of signs showing support for one or other police organisation or benevolent organisation. The signs clearly reflect an attitude that a traffic ticket is a piece of random bad luck to be made go away, rather than a punishment for a serious offence that could kill or maim another human being. That these signs continue to be so popular suggests they are effective at deterring trouble – and that many police officers agree on road offences’ importance.

It would surely make far more sense for senior police officers’ pay or promotion prospects to depend on measures of desirable outcomes on the roads. Would a precinct commander who knew his pay depended on a 20 per cent fall in road deaths and serious injuries send officers to harass cyclists using an important cycle path simply because it was too late at night? Would he allow his officers to hand out as many or more fines for excessively tinted windows in a month as for the widespread – and deadly – offence of speeding? It’s instead far more likely, I’d suggest, that officers would start to think seriously about policing the crimes that kill and injure large numbers of people every year. It should also help to stop the nonsense that drivers effectively buy immunity from prosecution via donations to police benevolent associations.

I can’t pretend, of course, that such a change would immediately turn every city road user everywhere into a practitioner of the highest, level six stage of moral development under Kohlberg’s principles. Those who have reached level six apply universal moral principles to their interactions with others, seeking to be entirely fair. Most UK police forces concentrate more on the deadliest offences – even if I disagree with many of their attitudes – and drivers in London remain often aggressive and inconsiderate.

But a clearly-signalled change of strategy would surely indicate to drivers that the outcomes of their behaviour – the numbers of pedestrians mowed down in crosswalks, for example – matter. It would shift drivers’ thinking about road policing away from a focus on the grubby transaction – how do I get this officer to ignore my speeding? – towards something a little more positive. What happens if I speed here, hit someone and get treated as other killers would?

The Manhattan Bridge: it is physically impossible, in good
weather, to bowl down the bike lane unobstructed
without a smile on one's face

I recognise such a change remains, sadly, far off in New York, although it may be closer – or may even have arrived – elsewhere.

The scene I encountered in the early hours of Saturday as I rode home makes me wish that were not so.

I had to work late and took a convoluted route home, through Times Square, the Broadway Bike Lane and the east side bike path to the Manhattan Bridge. As I started my climb onto the bridge around 1.30am, I encountered a young couple whizzing the other way on Citibikes, wearing the broad grin that pretty much anyone who’s ever barrelled down that lane unobstructed on a warm summer’s night must have done. A week before, they probably weren’t New York City cyclists. I can only now imagine they’re warmly commending the experience to their friends. It would be sad if a nasty grouch such as E55th street man were to change their minds – and an unspeakable tragedy if something still worse were to befall them.